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I believe this great article explains what you want, with screenshots galore. You want to create a special session in the login manager that will start a browser like Google Chrome using the kiosk option. You can set it up so that normal users automatically log into this kiosk session, but introduce a short time delay to allow an admin user to log into the ...

AuFS can solve this problem for you. Here is an example of people merging the filesystem with a RAM disk so changes go away on reboot.
If you don't have much memory, you could do the same using a loopback file or partition to store the changes, and re-format the loopback file/partition once a day.

Ensure that each machine has one account, an admin account with a fairly strong password. Do not give this password to users.
Log in as the admin and enable guest login, it should be under the user settings in system preferences. Then log out.
When users arrive, they can login as 'guest' without a password, and use the computer as if they had an account.
...

How to use Chrome browser in kiosk-mode
Use it like this:
google-chrome --kiosk http://example.com
chromium-browser --kiosk http://example.com
tested with Ubuntu 12.04, google-chrome-stable 30.0.1599.66-1 and chromium-browser 28.0.1500.71-0ubuntu1.12.04. But only if there is no other instance of the browser running.
So close all browser windows and then ...

Try xtrlock,
xtrlock locks the X server till the user enters their password at
the
keyboard.
While xtrlock is running, the mouse and keyboard are grabbed and the
mouse cursor becomes a padlock. Output displayed by X programs, and
windows put up by new X clients, continue to be visible, and any new
output is displayed ...

Delete or alter system files
Alter the system settings
Add or remove applications
To do any of these you need the sudo password. So after installing your system you have your own account and start creating normal users. Do not tell them the sudo password and they can not alter these. All they can do is change values in their own home.
If you want total ...

This is a tricky one, I had a similar problem, when trying to have only a ncurses based interface on a time tracker pc, the problem for me was that when no window manager is present, normal X Window applications behave oddly.
Here's my proposal:
Install ratpoison window manager sudo apt-get install ratpoison
Unbind keyboards that shows a menu or allows ...

Kiosk mode stands for a machine with very restricted acting ability. Often it is used to allow quick internet access for user of the machine, but not much more.
Here is an instruction for Setting up a Ubuntu 10.04 Internet Kiosk.
Another possibility would be to use Gofris to reset the system settings after every reboot.

The main issue here is that .bash_profile is not read when you do a graphical login. It is a bash-specific file, it's read when you start a login shell and I very much doubt it will ever be read on graphical login.
You would have a better chance using ~/.profile instead which is i) read by most login shells, not only bash, so you're not limiting your user ...

I wrote my own script to do this. There is a tool called xprintidle that gives you the idle time of an xsession. You need to install it first
sudo apt-get install xprintidle
Then create the script, for example in /root/bin/idle_check.sh:
#!/bin/sh
DISPLAY=:0
TIMEOUT=600000 # 10min = 10 * 60 * 1000
if [ $(xprintidle) -gt $TIMEOUT ]; then
...

Frustrated with autolog, I wrote my own script too. It's on Github.
It's general enough for multiple users, on X sessions and TTYs.
I have included an Upstart job, assuming that the script is placed at /usr/bin/idle-killer.sh
To set it up:
sudo apt-get install xprintidle
sudo wget ...

Cron will work very well for this.
Add the below line (with tweaks) to the end of /etc/crontab:
30 23 * * * root shutdown -h now
At 23:30 (11:30 PM), the kiosk will shut down. No matter what user is logged in, the shutdown command runs as root.
(If you don't want to use the global crontab, log in as root and use crontab -e. Use the same above syntax ...

I found a way use Firefox instead because I wanted to avoid fullscreen mode:
A kiosk solution with Ubuntu+Firefox:
Install Ubuntu/Lubuntu/whatever
Make user admin
Make user kiosk
Set kiosk to autologin, no password
Fix permissions (so kiosk cannot ctrl-s and peep into /home/admin)
cd /home
sudo chmod 700 *
Check if printer and other hardware, you might ...

Firefox Kiosk
Chromium-browser kiosk configurations do not allow for web pages requiring ‘java’. Java (IcedTea) doesn't have a PPAPI plugin available, and so it's not usable in Chromium, since Chromium 34 in Trusty has switched to the Aura rendering framework and no longer allows NPAPI plugins.
Firefox kiosk does! This configuration works on both Ubuntu ...

If you want to encrypt your hard drive – or any of the files on it, for that matter – you have to be prepared to enter a password at least once per boot. That's the price to pay.
Sorry if this sounds harsh, but it's just the way it is. In order to encrypt something, you have to have a password you enter every time. Without it, e.g. with the complete key ...

Assuming your kiosk browser is showing a page under your control, add some JS to that page to bind to the keydown event. In your event handler, check if the key(s) pressed match those you want to "block" - and if so call event.preventDefault(). This should stop the browser's default behaviour of closing/exiting.
e.g. (using jQuery):
...

Install "Slim" desktop manager.
Download for the Ubuntu Software Center:
Or Install with the Terminal:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install slim
Slim can automatically login a user. Just change /etc/slim.conf as described here.
Slim then starts all services in .xinitrc which lies in the home directory of the user that automatically logged in, ...

Your requirements remind me of a typical setup of MythTV, which just automatically logs in, and starts an X session which then starts only one application (the front end) instead of a window manager.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Frontend_Auto_Login#Method_1
It would seem that this can be adapted to your purposes. Virtual terminals would still be available ...

Not sure why Chrome is doing this, but if you have a look at:
/home/{kiosk_user}/.config/google-chrome/Default/Preferences
-- you will see browser.window_placement and you should see a difference of about 20 pixels between bottom and work_area_bottom, and right and work_area_right.
I edited the values to be the full extents of the display size, and ...

A cronjob seems to be the best way because you can specify different times for different days.
On Gnome based systems you can just install GNOME Shedule Tasks (http://gnome-schedule.sourceforge.net/) by using sudo apt-get install gnome-schedule and then configure the cronjobs using the GUI
otherwise you would have to use sudo crontab -e and then add the ...

Why not format a little hard disk (or SSD) as a Live USB and boot from it ?
See: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-ubuntu
and select your little hard disk as "Disk to use".
With a SSD you could even consider rebooting for every new user.